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Jacob’s Last Words to His Sons

Then Jacob called his sons, and said: “Gather around, that I may tell you what will happen to you in days to come.

Assemble and hear, O sons of Jacob;

listen to Israel your father.

Reuben, you are my firstborn,

my might and the first fruits of my vigor,

excelling in rank and excelling in power.

Unstable as water, you shall no longer excel

because you went up onto your father’s bed;

then you defiled it—you went up onto my couch!

Simeon and Levi are brothers;

weapons of violence are their swords.

May I never come into their council;

may I not be joined to their company—

for in their anger they killed men,

and at their whim they hamstrung oxen.

Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce,

and their wrath, for it is cruel!

I will divide them in Jacob,

and scatter them in Israel.

Judah, your brothers shall praise you;

your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies;

your father’s sons shall bow down before you.

Judah is a lion’s whelp;

from the prey, my son, you have gone up.

He crouches down, he stretches out like a lion,

like a lioness—who dares rouse him up?

The scepter shall not depart from Judah,

nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,

until tribute comes to him;

and the obedience of the peoples is his.

Binding his foal to the vine

and his donkey’s colt to the choice vine,

he washes his garments in wine

and his robe in the blood of grapes;

his eyes are darker than wine,

and his teeth whiter than milk.

Zebulun shall settle at the shore of the sea;

he shall be a haven for ships,

and his border shall be at Sidon.

Issachar is a strong donkey,

lying down between the sheepfolds;

he saw that a resting place was good,

and that the land was pleasant;

so he bowed his shoulder to the burden,

and became a slave at forced labor.

Dan shall judge his people

as one of the tribes of Israel.

Dan shall be a snake by the roadside,

a viper along the path,

that bites the horse’s heels

so that its rider falls backward.

I wait for your salvation, O L ord.

Gad shall be raided by raiders,

but he shall raid at their heels.

Asher’s food shall be rich,

and he shall provide royal delicacies.

Naphtali is a doe let loose

that bears lovely fawns.

Joseph is a fruitful bough,

a fruitful bough by a spring;

his branches run over the wall.

The archers fiercely attacked him;

they shot at him and pressed him hard.

Yet his bow remained taut,

and his arms were made agile

by the hands of the Mighty One of Jacob,

by the name of the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel,

by the God of your father, who will help you,

by the Almighty who will bless you

with blessings of heaven above,

blessings of the deep that lies beneath,

blessings of the breasts and of the womb.

The blessings of your father

are stronger than the blessings of the eternal mountains,

the bounties of the everlasting hills;

may they be on the head of Joseph,

on the brow of him who was set apart from his brothers.

Benjamin is a ravenous wolf,

in the morning devouring the prey,

and at evening dividing the spoil.”

²⁸ All these are the twelve tribes of Israel, and this is what their father said to them when he blessed them, blessing each one of them with a suitable blessing.

Jacob’s Death and Burial

²⁹ Then he charged them, saying to them, “I am about to be gathered to my people. Bury me with my ancestors—in the cave in the field of Ephron the Hittite, ³⁰in the cave in the field at Machpelah, near Mamre, in the land of Canaan, in the field that Abraham bought from Ephron the Hittite as a burial site. ³¹There Abraham and his wife Sarah were buried; there Isaac and his wife Rebekah were buried; and there I buried Leah— ³²the field and the cave that is in it were purchased from the Hittites.” ³³When Jacob ended his charge to his sons, he drew up his feet into the bed, breathed his last, and was gathered to his people.

New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

4. Unstable as water. He shows that the honor which had not a good conscience for its keeper, was not firm but evanescent; and thus he rejects Reuben from the primogeniture. He declares the cause, lest Reuben should complain that he was punished when innocent: for it was also of great consequence, in this affair, that he should be convinced of his fault, lest his punishment should not be attended with profit. We now see Jacob, having laid carnal affection aside, executing the office of a prophet with vigor and magnanimity. For this judgment is not to be ascribed to anger, as if the father desired to take private vengeance of his son: but it proceeded from the Spirit of God; because Jacob kept fully in mind the burden imposed upon him. The word עלח (alach) the close of the sentence signifies to depart, or to be blown away like the ascending smoke, which is dispersed.¹⁹⁶¹⁹⁶ The literal translation of Calvin’s version is, “Thy velocity was like that of water, thou shalt not excel: because thou wentest up into thy father’s couch, then thou pollutedst my bed, he has vanished.” This gives the patriarch’s expression a different turn from that supposed by our translators; who understand the last word in the sentence to be a repetition of what had been said before, only putting it in the third person, as expressive of indignation; as if he had turned round from Reuben to his other children and said — “Yes, I declare he went up into my bed!” Another view is given in the margin of our Bible, “My couch is gone;” which means that, by this defilement, the marriage bond was broken. To this version Calvin objects at the close of the paragraph. But both these constructions seem forced. Calvin’s appears the most natural. He represents Reuben as having lost all, by his criminal conduct. Honour, excellence, priority, virtue, and consequently character and influence, had all gone up as the dew from the face of the earth, and had vanished away. — Ed. Therefore the sense is, that the excellency of Reuben, from the time that he had defiled his father’s bed, had flowed away and become extinct. For to expound the expression concerning the bed, to mean that it ceased to be Jacob’s conjugal bed, because Bilhah had been divorced, is too frigid.

¹⁹⁶ The literal translation of Calvin’s version is, “Thy velocity was like that of water, thou shalt not excel: because thou wentest up into thy father’s couch, then thou pollutedst my bed, he has vanished.” This gives the patriarch’s expression a different turn from that supposed by our translators; who understand the last word in the sentence to be a repetition of what had been said before, only putting it in the third person, as expressive of indignation; as if he had turned round from Reuben to his other children and said — “Yes, I declare he went up into my bed!” Another view is given in the margin of our Bible, “My couch is gone;” which means that, by this defilement, the marriage bond was broken. To this version Calvin objects at the close of the paragraph. But both these constructions seem forced. Calvin’s appears the most natural. He represents Reuben as having lost all, by his criminal conduct. Honour, excellence, priority, virtue, and consequently character and influence, had all gone up as the dew from the face of the earth, and had vanished away. — Ed.